Irregular and Clandestine Marriages
An "irregular" marriage was one that took place either away from the home parish of the spouses (but after banns or licence), or at an improper time. "Clandestine" marriages were those that had an element of secrecy to them: perhaps they took place away from a home parish, and without either banns or marriage licence. It is often asserted, mistakenly, that under English law a marriage could be recognized as valid if each spouse had simply expressed (to each other) an unconditional consent to their marriage. These "common-law marriages" as they might be termed today were the exception. Nearly all marriages in England, including the "irregular" and "clandestine" ones, were performed by ordained clergy.
The Marriage Duty Act 1695 put an end to irregular marriages at parochial churches by penalizing clergymen who married couples without banns or licence. By a legal quirk, however, clergymen operating in the Fleet could not effectively be proceeded against, and the clandestine marriage business there carried on. In the 1740s, over half of all London weddings were taking place in the environs of the Fleet Prison. The majority of Fleet marriages were for honest purposes, when couples simply wanted to get married quickly or at low cost.
Read more about this topic: Fleet Marriage
Famous quotes containing the words irregular and, irregular, clandestine and/or marriages:
“The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Good marriages are built on respectful disagreement and back-and-forth cooperation. We learn to cue each other, fill in for each other, forgive each other’s fumbles, celebrate small victories. We revel in the realization that we’re working on something bigger than both of us, and that parenthood is not only incredibly challenging but also incredibly enriching.”
—Susan Lapinski (20th century)